St. Henry church to reopen for daily weekday Masses, three years after bitter lock-out

Three and a half years after it summoned policeto pry the church out of their grasp, the Archdiocese of New Orleans told former parishioners and other supporters of St. Henry Catholic Church on Saturday that their church will reopen for regular weekday Masses, beginning next week. The announcement by Monsignor Christopher Nalty came at a morning gathering of 50 or so St. Henry stalwarts who for years have met each week to pray the rosary at their closed church — in early months, outside on its steps, and later, with the archdiocese’s permission, inside.

Most did not expect the news. Hearing it, they applauded and hugged each other. A few wept.

Among them was Sandra LeBlanc of Harahan, who, with her husband, Milton, sat in shifts inside St. Henry during a 72-day occupation in 2008-09 aimed at preventing the archdiocese from closing it as part of a consolidation of New Orleans parishes after Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s the answer to our prayers,” LeBlanc said.

Nalty told the group that St. Henry, in the 800 block of Gen. Pershing Street, will be the site of a 6:30 a.m. Mass each weekday. The church will also be available for weddings but will not host Sunday Masses.

Nalty is the pastor of Good Shepherd Parish, which includes St. Henry in its boundaries, so it fell to him to make the announcement Saturday, even though the decision was ultimately that of Archbishop Gregory Aymond. Nalty used Aymond’s formal letter to him confirming the changes as the device to make the announcement.

Good Shepherd Parish was formed in 2008 when then-Archbishop Alfred Hughes ordered a post-Katrina consolidation of parishes from 142 to about 108. That plan closed St. Henry Church and parish, as well as nearby Our Lady of Good Counsel Church and parish. The two were merged with nearby St. Stephen Parish, which took a new post-merger name, although the church still goes by its old name.

Nalty said in an interview that making St. Henry a site for Good Shepherd’s daily parish Mass seemed a good solution to a continuing problem.

Currently, Good Shepherd’s daily Mass is celebrated in a small chapel in Nalty’s rectory to avoid the expense of heating or cooling the cavernous Napoleon Avenue church on weekdays, he said.

Nalty said the archdiocese has always preferred putting its closed churches to some new use, rather then selling them for secular operations.

Last year, St. Henry was considered as a potential site for a months-long exhibit on the life of Pope John Paul II, but logistical problems moved that exhibit to Notre Dame Seminary. It will open in February.

Nearby, Our Lady of Good Counsel, closed in the same consolidation and for a while occupied by its parishioners as well, is also to find new life. Aymond announced in December that the Louisiana Avenue church will become the home of a Catholic charismatic community, the Center of Jesus the Lord, which is moving out of the French Quarter.

However, that has not happened yet. That move will require renovations to the church, and members of the Good Counsel and charismatic communities are discussing the extent of those renovations, Nalty said.

Aymond’s latest decision gave the friends of St. Henry much of what they hoped for in 2008 and 2009, when they bitterly resisted Hughes’ closure order, occupied the church and gathered regularly there to pray.

In addition, they kept up old parish holiday traditions, prayed for sick parish members and tried to maintain a sense of community in exile — including planning an annual reunion, which comes up again next month.

The announcement does not mean that St. Henry Parish is restored, nor that regular Sunday Masses will resume at the church. Still, the supporters were jubilant at the news their church will reopen. There were no fierce declarations of victory, and they expressed their gratitude to Aymond for working with them since becoming archbishop in 2009.

Among them, Cyndi Robidoux, a loyalist who had begged to be publicly arrested on the day of the evictions in 2009, wept at the announcement because, she told Nalty, it meant that the Eucharist, the sacrament at the center of Catholic life, would be returned to the building and the neighborhood in a newly active church.

“To me, that’s the most important thing,” she said later. “When they shut the door, they took the body of Christ out of the building. ... To have it come back is the most beautiful thing.”

She added: “Nothing can erase what we went through, but this is what we wanted. Not everything — but we have Mass. In church. Again. It’s fantastic.”

As it happened, the unsuspecting parishioners who gathered Saturday prayed five decades of the rosary focusing on the triumphs in the life of Jesus Christ — the so-called joyful mysteries.

When they concluded, Alden Hagardorn, a parishioner who for years has been their spokesman and a chief organizer of St. Henry’s resistance, announced the session was over, but added a coda: “And there’s the sixth joyful mystery: the reopening of St. Henry’s.”